Whitemantle (19 page)

Nothing.

That in itself was strange. Chlu could not still be in Trinovant, or anywhere else within a dozen leagues. A coincidence, then, that he had chosen to leave on the same night as the duke? Possibly, but very unlikely. For first Edward’s host, then that of the Duke of Ebor suddenly to muster and leave within hours of one another – there must have been a plan, and a secret one at that, and Chlu had reacted most swiftly to the departures.

‘Out of bed at last, I see,’ Gort said, coming up. ‘And out of your shoes too. A bit cold for that kind of dance, hey?’

Will frowned. ‘Where have they all gone off to in such a wildfire rush, eh, Wortmaster?’

‘Wouldn’t we both like to know the answer to that? So…better try to find out, hey?’

A fresh warning sounded at the back of Will’s mind. ‘And they all got away without Master Gwydion getting wind of it? That’s something.’

‘Not so much as you might think, since the sneaking off was done in Master Gwydion’s absence.’

‘He’s not in the palace?’

‘He was abroad all last night. He’s still not back.’

‘Then you’ll have to find him. I have something to tell him.’

Gort rumbled. ‘Finding him’s easier said than done these days.’

Will knew he had heard an undertone of concern. ‘What do you mean?’

Gort’s vigilance returned. ‘Oh, only that if a wizard doesn’t want to be found…’

‘
Doesn’t
he want to be found? I should have thought that at a time like this he’d be looking for
us.
Wortmaster, is there something you’re not telling me?’

‘I’m always not telling you lots of things.’ Gort’s glance alighted on Will, but then fluttered away again like a butterfly. ‘As you say, Willand, I’ll try to find him.’

Will nodded. ‘And I’ll see what I can find out. Let’s meet back here at noon. I promise I’ll be here. And tell Willow to prepare to travel.’

Gort headed back to the stair and Will went the other way, passing the stacked timbers that had once been Magog and Gogmagog. They were slick with rain now, and water had collected in their empty eye sockets, so their blind gazes seemed full of sky.

When Will reached the main gates he noticed a knot of men and approached them. Edmund was among the shadows under the arches of the gatehouse. He was preparing to leave. Two servants were helping him up onto his horse, and his bodyguard moved to block Will as he came up.

‘Edmund! Please, I must speak with you.’

The tragic young earl turned and recognized Will. At first, Will thought he would ignore his plea, but then he motioned him forward, and the guards allowed him to pass.

Edmund’s stoop was pronounced, even on horseback. It seemed as if he had lost the power over half his body. He favoured his serviceable left arm and kept the withered right hidden inside a fold of his riding cloak. His mouth closed lop-sidedly so that he drooled. The cold had blotched his face with red, and caused spittle to chap his skin. But Will had always liked Edmund. Lately he had come to admire his stubborn courage, and even his ingenuity. Edmund had taught his favourite horse a whole new set of commands, and had even had his saddle remade according to a pattern of his own devising, so that he could ride without discomfort.

Edmund drawled, ‘Wish a safety…upon me, Will…and upon my father’s…enterprise.’

At first, Will could not grasp the meaning. Edmund could not easily get his words out. Speaking was so painful a process that it destroyed cadence and emphasis in all that he said. Listening to Edmund required patience.

Will reached up and took the young earl’s offered hand in a brief grip. ‘I would put a blessing on all your house if I could, Edmund. Where has your father gone?’

Another mumble while Edmund’s eyes rolled in their sockets. ‘I may…not say.’

‘Then answer me this: has the Earl of the Marches gone with him?’

Edmund’s helplessly roaming eyes slid deliberately away. ‘Edward is…elsewhere.’

Will could feel the silent consternation that passed among Edmund’s guard. Everyone knew that it was dangerous to give any kind of clue to a crow, for by his arts he would work upon it and soon come to know more than he should. Whatever the truth, Will could see clearly enough what must have happened. Edward had tried to square matters with his father without employing Gwydion’s help, so it had all gone wrong. There had been hot words, and the bonfire against which Will had cautioned had flared up.

The headstrong fool, Will thought, though part of him wondered if some of the blame was his own for mishandling Edward. He said, ‘Edward’s gone to the Marchlands to gather forces. He’s angry with your father. They argued. That’s so, isn’t it?’

Edmund became animated. His head jerked this way and that as he brayed, ‘In…invasion!’

‘Invasion?’ The castle of straw that Will had built in his mind came tumbling down. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

‘Queen Mag…no more…in Albanay!’

Will blinked at the harsh sound, then at the news.

‘Thank you, Edmund.’

He understood. But how had Queen Mag come to afford an invasion? The penniless widow must have bargained with the Regent of Albanay to raise an army.

Will recalled Mag’s extraordinary talents. He now saw how wide of the mark Lord Warrewyk’s assumptions had been. To Warrewyk, Mag was no more than the exiled wife of a captured king, a defeated power, a pauper hoping to work her wiles in a faraway court. But Will knew how formidable she would be in her plight, and with Maskull at her side she would be quite impossible to refuse.

Will nodded, suddenly aware of what effect the inflammatory news from Trinovant must already have had all
across the north. The likelihood was that Mag had promised to give away the long-disputed border territory of Tweedale – ‘Berrick and its castle to you, my lord Regent, as soon as I am queen again.’ Yes! And if she had gulled the Weirds of Albanay too, then…

Will felt the ghastly stirrings of the lorc and his stomach turned over. ‘Where’s your father headed? Tell me, Edmund!’

But Edmund’s knee trembled against his horse’s flank, and his impatient party began to move off past the North Turret and into the road.

‘Why wouldn’t Edmund tell you?’ Willow asked as she flung clothes into a basket.

‘Because he’d given his word to his father.’

‘It doesn’t matter. We’re going to find out soon enough. Half the traders of Trinovant will be alongside the duke’s baggage train by the end of the first day’s march.’

‘I agree. We can afford a day’s delay, but no more. We can hardly lose them. And if we follow on horseback, we can hardly fail to catch them.’ He rubbed the back of his hand across his face. ‘But to what end? The duke won’t brook any more interference from Master Gwydion, so what can we do?’

‘Doesn’t he see that an Ogdoad wizard is the only one who can save him now?’

‘No, he doesn’t see mat.’ Will took his wife’s hand. ‘And is it true any more? The world is changing fast and the duke believes in magic even less than he used to. Where’s Lotan?’

‘Out in his new finery.’

‘Doing what?’

‘He says he feels naked without a sword.’

‘By the moon and stars! No sooner does he get his flesh back than he wants to start chopping other people up! Is there any hope for mankind?’

‘Don’t blame Lotan. It’s our world that’s turning grey.’

Will dug his fingers in his hair and swept it back from his face. ‘If the world is turning bad, then maybe not believing in magic is the only thing that will save the duke. Maybe he’s doing the right thing in adjusting piecemeal to this terrible new world that’s coming.’

Hope and strength faded from her face. ‘So…where does that leave the likes of us?’

‘For the moment we’re going to have to tail an army.’ He began to make for the gates.

The journey was no more than half a league, though the weather was against them. They arrived at the place where the Ebor army had lived for months and found there only the filthy remains of a camp. Skinny dogs and beggars raked over the ground, scavenging whatever they could, but what soldiers left behind, even when in a hurry to leave, was scant reward for those who braved the raw wind and driving rain.

The nearest alehouses were called the Lord Ordlea’s Arms and the Hogshead in the Pound, mirthfully renamed, no doubt, to ridicule the enemy in a way that soldiers would appreciate. In the first they found the innkeeper lamenting his loss of trade. In the second they picked up a confirming rumour that the queen’s host had already marched south across the border into Umberland with an Albanay army raised in expectation of plunder.

Among its many companies – or so it was said by those whose art it was to spin a tale in exchange for a drink – there lumbered wild-men and ogres from the haunted oak woods of Birnam. Once in Umberland, Queen Mag was said to have been joined by the Lords of the Pierce clan who commanded great numbers of men. And giants had come down from the misty crags of the Mountains of Umber to add their weight to the rampaging mob.

‘Giants?’ Willow asked, as they came away. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’

‘That’s just Cheap-side chatter,’ Will said, looking up and down the dismal winter road as if for a better clue as to where the duke might have gone.

‘Surely we’ll find them on the Great North Road.’ Willow picked her way across a sea of mud. ‘They’ll be heading for Verlamion, or I’m a fool.’

For a second time Will surveyed the filth and destruction that had been left behind in May Fair Fields. He felt for the power that surged in the land, but the nearest lign passed too far away for his toes to pick up any sensation.

‘North…maybe you’re right, after all,’ he said doubtfully.

‘Do you think otherwise?’

‘Hmm. Don’t forget that the armies are being attracted to the next battlestone like flakes of iron to a lodestone. But is that battle necessarily going to be against Queen Mag?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Something has been working powerful trouble between Edward and his father during their time at the White Hall. I must find Master Gwydion. You go back to the palace and gather up Lotan. I’ll meet you both there at noon. I have a promise to keep.’

But it was not until mid-afternoon that Gort came in, and he brought Gwydion with him. The Wortmaster said he had arranged an urgent gathering, and Will might be surprised at who came to it. In return, Will whispered to Gort that he should brace himself for a bucketful of trouble.

‘A rift between father and son, you say?’ the wizard remarked, having listened with only slight interest to Will’s suspicions.

‘There must be some harmful token,’ Will said. ‘A carrier
of Maskull’s mischief still hidden inside the palace walls, something you’ve missed.’

‘That is most unlikely. But what do you say of this
undeniable
curiosity?’ Gwydion held up a strange fruit in triumph.

Will was surprised. ‘What’s that?’

‘Something the like of which has never been seen here before. This morning I spoke with a Bristowe sea captain who claims to have set foot upon the isle of Hy Brasil. He brought this and other things back as proof.’

Will turned it over, unhappy at Gwydion’s way of leaving aside that which seemed most important and looking instead at trifles. ‘Fascinating. But this has no bearing on what I’m trying to tell you.’

‘Oh, but you’re quite wrong about that,’ Gort said excitedly. ‘The mariner speaks of many flowers and trees of unknown form.’ He took the fruit like a sacred offering. ‘Is this not
marvelbus
?’

‘Wortmaster…’ Will put a hand briefly to his head then shook it in a gesture of perplexity and frustration.

Gwydion laid an arm across Will’s shoulders. ‘A whole New World is out there in the Western Deeps, Willand. Whoever thought that our own world would end thus? Certainly not I.’

‘Master Gwydion, please listen to me!’

But the wizard still paid him no heed. Today he seemed paler and greyer and somehow less substantial than Will had ever known him, but it was the lack of focus to his thoughts that worried Will most. The wizard drew something from a fold of his robe and laid it on Gort’s untidy table. ‘You know what this is, Willand.’

It was the white rod that belonged to the duke, the one he carried as if it were a rod of office.

‘How did you get that?’ Will said, amazed. ‘I can’t believe the duke left without his unicorn wand.’

‘Unicorn? Oh, not so,’ Gort muttered, still engrossed in the foreign fruit. ‘That’s corpse-whale ivory.’

Will looked at the wand again. ‘Not unicorn? But I’ve always thought—’

‘Few people now remember unicorns,’ Gwydion said. ‘Ask whoever you like, most will claim such beasts as that never were. And why? Because there is no longer any proof. Their every trace has vanished.’

‘But…that
was
a unicorn’s horn once.’

‘Was it? It looks to me as if it was always a corpse-whale’s tooth.’

Will sat down heavily. ‘And what, may I ask, is a corpse-whale?’

‘A denizen of the deep.’ Gwydion sat back and steepled his fingers. ‘Called by those in the Far North “narwhal”. The he-narwhal has but two teeth in his head. The leftmost grows out twisting widdershins about itself until it is longer than a man is tall.’

Will scoffed. ‘Such a fish as that? It’s surely ridiculous nonsense!’

‘I speak the truth! And it is not a fish, but a creature that breathes the air like you or I. Often a broken end like that one is found on some icy northern beach and brought south, where it is inevitably taken for a unicorn’s horn by the credulous.’

‘I don’t believe that for a moment!’

‘You had better.’ Gwydion stared at him strangely. ‘For it is the only kind of unicorn horn this world shall know soon. And the only kind of truth. That pretty yale you saw – did you ever think that perhaps you had been honoured with the last ever look at such a noble beast?’

‘The last ever? You mean—’

Gort cut in. ‘Did you not know that a yale was washed up at low tide below Southfolk Steps yesterday?’

‘Dead?’

‘As a doornail.’ Gwydion sighed. ‘I would wager a king’s ransom that it was the last of its kind.’

‘Oh, no…’

‘This is how far the world has come in just a few short months. Our world is saying goodbye to us. Can’t you hear it?’